Facebook and Deloitte Are Joining Forces to Help Companies Become Digital Businesses

The alliance's four 'pillars' are people, technology, insights and experience innovation

Facebook and Deloitte Digital announced that they have formed an alliance aimed at helping companies “fully evolve into digital businesses.”

The two companies said in an email to Social Pro Daily that the goal of their alliance is to “rewire legacy business and marketing models to create long-term business value,” and they will focus on these four “pillars”:

People: Inspire and rewire culture and talent across an organization to help people establish new ways of thinking, collaborating and connecting to build value for people and businesses.

Technology: Provide clients with the mobile tools, workflows and information needed to discern what technology and system investments will support their business infrastructure and marketing measurement demands and the ability to make smart decisions quickly.

Insights: Help business leaders create new customer segments, develop better content and ultimately inform decisions that impact their bottom line.

Experience innovation: Develop new ways to connect emerging technologies with marketing to drive business value and growth.

Facebook and Deloitte Digital conducted a study to analyze the “digital maturity of the marketing industry,” and they found that although digital has been a “huge part” of conversation in the marketing industry for a long time, the transition is not yet complete, and marketing organizations are not functioning as digital businesses.

Other findings included:

The two companies found a gap between perceived digital maturity and actual digital maturity, meaning that marketing organizations are “doing” digital but not “becoming” digital and are nowhere near “being” digital.

The industry’s training methods, company cultures, current processes, ways of working and business structures don’t lend themselves to becoming digital.

According to Deloitte’s annual study of chief marketing officers, 87 percent believe their businesses will be “disrupted” by digital business models, but only 30 percent believe they are prepared to execute on those models.

Most marketing teams are still divided between digital and “traditional,” preventing them from functioning as mobile-first.

Millennials ranked the digital capabilities of their organizations more negatively than older generations did.

Facebook vice president of global agency development Patrick Harris said in a statement emailed to Social Pro Daily:

People have made the shift to mobile and businesses need to catch up. To that end, there’s increasing pressure for business leaders to keep up with emerging technologies and create business growth. With this alliance, Facebook and Deloitte Digital will help businesses accelerate this change within their own organizations. We’re excited to work with Deloitte Digital to leverage their expertise beyond marketing and combine with Facebook’s global scale and connections between people and businesses to help marketers make this shift and achieve business results.

C-suite executives are under intense pressure to create business growth in the digital age, but they don’t have the right skills in place within the marketing function to create real business value. To succeed, traditional businesses not only need to develop cutting-edge technology platforms and analytics capabilities, they also need to change the way their people think, work and collaborate if they want to achieve the possibilities digital technology has put within reach. This involves fundamental shifts in an organization’s culture to embrace customer-centricity, accelerate change, enable ability and flexibility and deliver value quickly—and that’s what we’re trying to help companies do as part of this alliance.